Button, An Eight-Month-Old Startup That Wants Apps To Talk To Each Other, Just Raised $12 Million

Button, a startup that's less than a year old, just raised
$12 million in a Series A round of funding.

The new funding was led by
Redpoint Ventures with participation from Greycroft,
DCM, VaynerRSE, Slow Ventures, and NBA Commissioner Emeritus
David Stern.

Redpoint’s Chris Moore will
be joining Button's board. In July, Button raised $2.25 million in
a round of seed funding.

Button wants to make apps
as connected as the internet is.

Button solves that problem by using "deep-linking," or
optimizing the apps on your phone to talk to one another and
work cohesively, kind of like the internet. It means you can
hail an Uber and see your fare estimate from inside
restaurant reservation app Resy. It creates a shortcut for
you as a customer, and it lets Button collect and create data
connections between your dinner reservation and you hailing a
ride to dinner.

"We live in an app world — and when we started Button, our
dream was to redefine how apps connected in the mobile
economy," Button CEO Michael Jaconi
explained in Thursday's fundraising
announcement.

"Our goal was to extend app experiences across the mobile
ecosystem — to solve the problem that we, as users, so often
felt: 'I want something, but I need to navigate through a
collection of screens, an app store, a registration, and
hopefully I remember what I wanted when the journey began.'

"Our rallying cry is to break down the walls and reduce the
friction of this disconnected app world."

Button's potential caught
the eye of Uber — a company that
has raised $4.9 billion — back in October.
Button launched
its DeepLink Commerce platform in a partnership with Uber in
the fall, and Uber showcased Button's development technology
during a keynote speech at Concur
DevCon.

Now, Button's development
technology can be used by other appmakers to put an "order an
Uber" feature in their own apps.

Button makes money on any
transaction that is done through its system. Besides Uber,
Button has struck up partnerships with Resy, on-demand hair
styling startup Glamsquad, and others.

Jaconi — an entrepreneur whose
cloud-based, loyalty rewards company FreeCause was acquired by Japanese
e-commerce company Rakuten a few years ago — has a small but
talented team of e-commerce veterans whose past experiences
include working for Rocket Internet, Google, Venmo, and JP
Morgan.

Jaconi told Business
Insider he's looking to grow his team with the new
funding.

"The partnerships we’ve
signed, our execution, and the caliber of the team we’ve
assembled has brought us this far. Our second chapter
starts now," Jaconi said in Thursday's announcement.